Lawyer SEO Tips

Does SEO Work For Lawyers?

Does SEO work for Lawyers? Absolutely. Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to drive relevant, potential clients to your website and into your law firm by using the power of quality, optimized content. Search engine optimization works for law firms, bakers, mechanics, and anyone else with a service/sales-based business. So if your law firm can handle extra clients, taking control of how you show up in the search engines is one of the best investments you can make.

How Does SEO Help Law Firms?

Search engine optimization helps by improving visibility. Increased visibility means that your law firm will reach many more potential clients, and in doing so, you'll get the opportunity to interact with people who otherwise would have never heard of you. Investing in a an agency to handle your SEO and control how you show up in search engines is one of the best ways to increase your firm's credibility.

Any great search engine specialist is going to want you to keep them around for as long as possible, and just getting more visitors on your website isn't going to do that. With a quality search consultant, your law firm won't just enjoy the benefits of increased traffic and credibility from being on the first page of search engines. Your law firm will also enjoy the benefit of improved conversion rates.

You'll want solid results, which come in the form of a higher likelihood that your visitors will take that next step, whether that next step looks like a phone call, a quote, or a form submission. Regardless of what the next step looks like, you can customize that process however makes the most sense for your law firm's goals.

Search engine optimization isn't just about keywords and optimizations. SEO is primarily about researching your target demographic to find out how we can best position your firm in front of the most relevant leads possible.

Why Do Lawyers Need SEO?

Law firms are one of many professions that benefit most from having a quality, authoritative, informative website representing their business. Statistics show that companies represented by unprofessional websites will instantly be labeled as untrustworthy by 46.1% of users. If you care about your law firm's reputation, you owe it to your firm to do all you can to take control of how your business is presenting itself online. A professional website can prevent nearly 50% of your potential clients from missing an opportunity to work with your firm just because your website needs to do your business justice.

You spend your career in law doing justice for your clients. Your law firm can benefit in many ways from investing in a quality search engine strategy. It's time to let the search experts do justice for you.

What Are The Top 3 SEO Strategies?

There are three different strategies that all work together as one in any search engine campaign. The primary goal that all serve to achieve is reputation management. Search results are determined by algorithms that look for key signals that help them determine the quality of your law firm. If you lack any of the three strategies, you will limit yourself from your online potential.

Website Optimization

The first step, before anything else, is to do the necessary research to optimize your website correctly. Google isn't looking at any one thing to determine the level of trust they will impart to your law firm, but the main factor is how well your website stays within the parameters given by Google. If you have a website that doesn't break any rules, regulations/guidelines, then all search engines will likely promote your website to more and more clients.

Website optimization is the most collaborative step with your law firm and search engine specialist. During this step, your search consultant needs to understand where you want your company to go. What goals do you have in mind for where you'd like your law firm to be in a few years? What clientele do you prefer, and what clientele are you mainly working with now? Would you like to be set up so you can target a different clientele in the future? What is the preferred process in terms of how your sales pipeline will work? When designing and executing your search strategy, it's essential to understand the answers to these questions because it will determine how your website is optimized and structured.

Content Creation

Once your goals, processes, and expectations are understood, and your website is optimized for search, the fun part starts. Content creation is where your SEO will begin positioning your law firm in front of as many qualified clients as possible with quality, well-structured, informative, and optimized content. Any search engine specialist will do this on a schedule, so your law firm is doing one of the main things Google loves - consistently creating quality, industry-specific content.

In time with this content, Google begins to see your firm as an authority, meaning you will start to show up on the first page easier and more quickly than before, meaning your traffic growth will begin to compound itself. But not only will your website get more traffic, but because your SEO will be optimizing your website for increased conversions, you will also see a compounding growth in the calls, form submissions, etc., it's receiving.

Link Building

Link building is one of the most critical parts of any search campaign. Search engines love websites that consistently create quality content, but social proof is what they love more than that. Any quality SEO will work dilligently to ensure that you receive the best, high-quality backlinks possible. The power of link building is that, with each new quality referring domain your website receives, all search engines will start to impart more and more trust to your company. Just as creating consistent, quality content will improve your visibility and make ranking easier, so will link building. You cannot have a complete search engine campaign without quality link building, and your law firm deserves to have a diverse, relevant, and robust backlink profile to ensure your success!

Top Five Lawyer SEO Tips

These five search engine optimization tips are by no means comprehensive. You can do many more things to drive more potential clients to your website, but if you take the time to complete these five, you'll be off to a great start. If you need any more help, to kick your efforts off, check out our SEO audit checklist! You can also read our article walking you through the benefits of setting up your own campaign.

Optimize Your GMB

So your GMB, or as it's now called, your Google business profile is one of the best ways to stand out amongst your local competitors because most of them need to take the time to optimize this. Optimizing your law firm's GMB is pretty simple. To optimize your GMB, ensure all of your information is 100% correct—hours of operation, phone number, etc.

Also, ensure that you answer any frequently asked questions your company receives in the FAQ section. As well as respond quickly to any Google reviews you receive.

Do Proper Keyword Research

If you want to improve your law firm's search engine performance, the best time you can spend is researching your keywords. Before you do anything, you'll always want to spend the time necessary to ensure you choose the right keywords. Otherwise, you're wasting your time focusing on keywords that aren't going to give your firm the ROI that it deserves.

Make Sure Not To Stuff Your Keywords

Now, in saying that you want to do proper keyword research, make sure you aren't stuffing the content your law firm puts out with those keywords. There is a thing called keyword density that you'll want to keep in mind. The idea behind keyword density is that for your law firm's content, you'll want to ensure none of your keywords make up more than 10% of all other words. So, for example, if you have 100 words written, your keyword shouldn't appear more than eight times (ideally, it should only appear 3-4 times).

If you ignore this search tip, your company could be seen as spammy, which is the last thing you want. Once search engines view your firm as spammy, untrustworthy, and not worth promoting, you ensure that all chances of driving clients to your website go out the window. No one will ever find you, and it may even cause you to have your site removed entirely. To reverse this, you'll have to hire a search engine specialist to improve your website's quality and reputation so that you can once again start getting your company in front of your clients again.

Create Quality Content

Once you understand how to do proper keyword research, and how to avoid overusing that information, you'll want to get started on creating quality content. Once you start creating quality content for your law firm, the most important part is to never stop. Set a content schedule and remember to always stick to it. It's important to create quality content, but it's more important to do it routinely so that search engines understand that your company is important to you. Once search engines see that you care about your company, they'll be a lot more likely to promote your content because you're a firm always helping out your industry with relevant, high-quality content.

Make Sure You Post Content Regularly

Video content is undoubtedly some of the best content your law firm can have on the website. Not only does video content give instant improvements to various on-page metrics search engines are tracking and monitoring, but it also helps to separate your law firm from the competition. Few firm owners will be willing to get in front of a camera, introduce themselves, and talk about relevant topics. Just making videos for each blog post alone will garner your firm a ton of traffic, because Google loves to promote video content, as it generally has much higher CTA than other forms of content.

Conclusion

Hopefully this helped you understand what you need to do to improve how your fares in search engines. If you have any questions about anything mentioned in the article, feel free to reach out and ask our search engine specialists any questions you might have. If you're wondering if you can learn SEO on your own, we have an article that will walk you through the beginning of your SEO journey.